A customer may open and maintain numerous accounts at a single financial institution such as, for example, a bank or a credit union. For example, a customer may be an account holder of a checking account, a savings account, and a credit card account at the same bank. Under such circumstances, the customer or account holder may manage the different accounts. For example, the account holder may receive separate statements for each account, make payments against the credit card account, and make deposits to and track withdrawals from the checking and savings accounts.
Financial institutions or banks also incur overhead when maintaining separate accounts for each customer. For example, the financial institution may track deposits, withdrawals, and accrued interest associated with various accounts for an account holder. The financial institution may apply payments made to, for example, a credit card account, and process withdrawals from and deposits to checking and savings accounts. The financial institution may generate and mail statements for each account to the customer on a periodic basis. Additionally, maintaining separate accounts may require training employees to handle each different type of account. For example, a first group of employees may be trained to process transactions regarding customer checking accounts but may not know how to process transactions regarding customer credit card accounts, and vice versa. Similarly, different processing systems may be used for each of the accounts. For example, hardware and software used to maintain customer credit card accounts may be different from hardware and software used to maintain customer savings accounts.
A mechanism to more closely align such multiple accounts may be developing in which an account holder may be provided a card that appears to the merchant, for example, as a credit card, but that is actually tied to another account of the customer such as, for example, a checking account or a savings account. Such a card may be referred to as a debit card. When a customer uses the debit card to purchase a product, the customer's checking account or savings account may fund the purchase rather than a charge being incurred against a credit-card account. Some financial institutions offer overdraft protection as well, automatically charging a separate credit-card account if the account holder overdraws on a checking account using a debit card. Thus, debit cards may provide the convenient functionality of credit cards without requiring the customer to write checks or even worry about whether there are funds in the debit account to cover a transaction. Even when linking two types of accounts together, however, the financial institution and customer alike still may maintain the two accounts.
For maximum efficiency, a financial institution may train employees to handle a combination of credit-card accounts, checking accounts, debit-card accounts, and savings accounts. Even with such increased efficiency, the financial institution incurs overhead costs in maintaining the separate accounts. For example, for each account, the financial institution maintains the customer's information (e.g., address) and continues to track transactions for each account and provide the customer with periodic statements of account activity.
Thus separate accounts create administrative burdens on the financial institution, resulting in inconvenience and increased transaction costs for the institution that may be passed on to the customers or account holders. Likewise, the separate accounts create an administrative burden on the customer who maintains the accounts and receives separate statements regarding each account.